


Who Hurt You? (No, Who Hurt Me?)

by fishoutofcamelot



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Dean Winchester and Sam Winchester Use Their Words, Episode: s14e12 Prophet and Loss, Gen, Hell Trauma, Trauma From Lucifer's Cage (Supernatural), all aboard the trauma train! choo choo!, possession aint no rodeo folks, usually it just runs you over, you dont even need to buy tickets for the trauma train
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-27
Updated: 2020-08-27
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:41:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26137504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fishoutofcamelot/pseuds/fishoutofcamelot
Summary: Dean has been possessed by an archangel, and now plans to lock himself away in a box to keep said angel from causing the end of the world.And if anyone knows what Dean's going through, it's Sam.
Relationships: Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester
Comments: 4
Kudos: 43





	Who Hurt You? (No, Who Hurt Me?)

Everyone had a different take on what possession felt like. 

Most notably came a frazzled Jimmy Novak's declaration that it was like being chained to a comet, and for a long while thereafter Dean couldn’t look at Cas without thinking of those words. Without trying to imagine the horrors of such an experience.

Meanwhile, Claire once confessed that it felt as though you were in a disturbingly bright room, and the effort it took to regain control of your body was like trying to force your eyes open despite the blinding pain. 

Bobby and Jody had been possessed by demons instead of angels, but the sentiments were similar. Bobby likened it to trying to shoot a target with both of your hands chopped off, with the target being the ability to regain control over your body. Jody likened it to being chained to a wall while birds picked at your brain, filing through all the memories you didn’t want to think about and forcing you to relive them one by one.

And Cas, in a wretched twist of karma, ended up getting possessed by Lucifer. And he, shakily, with haunted eyes and an even more haunted voice, whispered that Jimmy’s comet analogy had barely touched the surface. 

“Imagine having all your skin being peeled off,” Cas had croaked, voice less gravely and more cracked than usual. “Everything is raw and intense, and you try to pull your skin back on, like a - like a glove. No matter how much it hurts. But the one who’s peeling your skin off is just…” He shuddered. “...They’re just too fast for you to keep up with. The moment you put your flesh back in its place, it immediately gets peeled back off again. And you’re trapped in that - in that _endless cycle_ , until you manage to be just fast enough to get some leverage.” 

Dean thought he could relate that experience to Hell, to the various tortures he had both suffered and inflicted on others (he was wrong), and for that he appreciated Cas's testimony the most, along with Jody's.

Cas wasn't the only one who had been possessed by an archangel, but Sam never spoke about his time with Lucifer, nor could Dean ever hope to stomach such a conversation. Although he did used to talk about his time possessed by Meg, back in the day. And, albeit sparingly, by Gadreel.

“It’s like being on drugs,” Sam had said after Meg, after a few weeks of morosely staring out the window. “Most of the time you’re under the influence, but every once in a while you’re sober and you catch little glimpses of what’s going on, but you’re still too high to do anything about it.”

Dean had been young and out of his depth when it came to emotional stuff like that at the time, so he simply tried to lighten the mood by saying, “How do you know what being high is like?” To which Sam rolled his eyes and light-heartedly shoved him in lieu of an answer.

To this day Dean regretted his response. If he hadn’t been so bullheaded, maybe Sam would have felt more comfortable talking about his possession experiences. Maybe Dean would’ve been able to realize how traumatizing it was, and maybe he wouldn’t have coerced Sam into enduring Gadreel. 

Maybe Dean would’ve been prepared for Michael.

Logically, he knew there’s nothing he could have done to prepare for something like that. Something so...violating. Because Purgatory was bad, Hell was _really_ bad, and that one isolated prison cell was somehow worse than both of those places combined, but this? 

There weren’t words. To have something inside you, controlling you, all while gasping for air, all while trying to fight back but not having a body with which to do so, reduced to nothing but a bruised, fleeting soul inside your own meat-sack - Dean couldn’t conceive of any human words that would be adequate for describing such agony.

When Sam asked him to 'talk about it', the best he could do was relate it to drowning. Like trying and failing to keep your head above water, but every failed attempt just gets more air knocked out of your lungs.

It wasn’t a proper description. Not even close. But it still somehow made Sam cry. 

Truth is, all of them were right. Jimmy, Claire, Cas, Jody, Bobby - all of their accounts were simultaneously correct. Possession was blinding and bloody and intense and intoxicating, all at once. Perhaps that’s what made it so horrible. 

Later that night, when they finally got back to the bunker and crawled into their respective beds, both of them too emotionally exhausted to even say ‘goodnight’, Dean laid back in bed and stared at the ceiling, and remembered that Sam had once been possessed by an archangel too. He knew Dean's pain. And Dean...Dean knew Sam's.

Every time Dean had mentioned he didn’t regret his deal with Gadreel, that he’d do it again...those words now burned in his throat. Because now he knew what it was like to be possessed. He knew why Sam hated it so much, hated _him_ for doing it.

And to be honest, Dean hated himself too, a little.

He stopped talking about his Michael-related trauma after that. To Sam, anyway. How could he sit there and whine about the very same pain he’d put Sam through? 

So he talked to Cas. Sometimes. On rare occasions. Mostly he just listened to Cas tremulously gasp out the details of his own experiences, in a way that teetered on a precarious line between therapeutic and retraumatizing. But Cas insisted that talking helped, and always reached out the olive branch for Dean to do the same - “And if not to me, then to Sam. I don’t think I’ve met anyone who’s been possessed quite as much as he has. If anyone would know what you’re going through, it’s him.”

And that was the root of the problem. Sam _did_ know what Dean was going through, better than anyone. But talking to him about it felt a bit like walking up to an amputee and crying about your papercut. 

That was always the root of the problem, wasn’t it? Dean had lost Lisa and Ben, but Sam had lost Jess and Sarah and Madison and Amelia and Eileen (and, he suspected, Tyson Brady). Dean had endured 30 years of Hell, but Sam had gone through nearly 200. Dean had been possessed by Michael, but Sam had been possessed by Meg and Lucifer and Gadreel, and had a storied history of people stealing the reigns to his bodily autonomy like it was the universe’s favourite hobby or something.

How could you confess your pain to someone whose entire life was practically built on the stuff?

So he didn’t. Dean wasn’t generally very talkative about this sort of thing to begin with, but whenever the thoughts and pains were just too much to keep inside his chest, he’d sparse out a few choked words to Cas or Jody. Maybe Mom, if he was feeling open enough (but he very rarely was).

Sam undoubtedly knew what he was doing, knew that he was deliberately talking about his feelings to everyone _except_ Sam. Sam was undoubtedly deeply hurt by that. And every time Dean tried to reach out and console him that it wasn’t his fault Dean couldn’t talk to him, he’d remember Gadreel and then feel a strong urge to hurl.

Plus, there was a thin veneer of control that came from talking to people that weren’t Sam. With others, he had to at least pretend he was okay. He could keep his guard ever so slightly up, he could keep his most vulnerable emotions tucked behind a thick stone wall. But with Sam, he wouldn’t be able to hold anything back. All his sad and angry emotions would come rushing to the surface. And with those intense feelings came a strict loss of control over himself. Before Michael, his explosive anger reminded him of what it felt like to be under the Mark’s control. Now, it reminded him of drowning. 

Then Michael was locked up in his head and the pain of it was constantly beating against his mind like a drum, so Dean’s tenuous grip of his emotions - nay, his grip on reality - got lost amidst the noise. And it was like he was back in the water, back in that damn archangel’s unrelenting grip, but instead of drowning in the ocean, he now had the entire ocean trapped inside his skull. He wasn’t sure if that was better or worse.

Was this what it felt like, when Sam regained control over Lucifer long enough to jump off the diving board and into Hell? This feeling of being the world’s thinnest latex glove, left to hold off all the darkness in the universe by yourself, abandoned and alone and stretched so far you might snap?

Considering all the pitying glances Sam kept sending his way, Dean was inclined to say yes.

But look on the bright side - at least he had a leg up on Sam in the trauma department for once. Sam couldn’t say he had held back Lucifer for literal days, just a few moments.

Dean jolted awake from his dream, scratch marks driven into the motel wall beside him. In the distance, light from the bathroom slipped through a half-open doorway, casting Sam’s hulking silhouette into soft relief. 

“Oh, hey,” Sam said tiredly. “Didn’t mean to wake you. Sorry.”

Struggling to blink the weariness out of his eyes, and failing miserably, Dean shrugged. “No, it’s...just a bad dream. I’m fine.”

“You wanna talk about it?”

No, no he didn’t, he couldn’t talk to Sam about this because that would mean being sad and upset and losing control of his emotions and drowning drowning drowning -

“No, I’m - no, I’m okay.” As Sam migrated back to his bed, Dean deflected. “What’re you doing? Why don’t you try to get some sleep?”

Sam’s silent, sympathizing silence said everything his words couldn’t. He was gearing up for a Moment. Great. Just what they needed.

“You know, Dean, you don’t have to act like what you’re planning to do is just business as usual,” Sam said. There was an odd weight to his words. Sam’s words always had an odd weight to them these days, ever since Dean had first unveiled his plans with the Ma’lak Box. “I know you’re scared.”

Dean kept his face turned away from Sam. Don’t get upset, don’t get mad, don’t get emotional, don’t succumb to the war-hammer throbbing between your temples, don’t drown drown drown…

“Never said I wasn’t scared.” And wasn’t that a bitch and a half to admit. “But it doesn’t matter.”

“Doesn’t matter?” And there it was again, that odd tone of voice. Doubling in its intensity just as sharply as Sam’s watery gaze upon the back of Dean’s head. “We know we could die, doing what we do. It’s always a possibility. But what you’re talking about is _far_ worse than death. Michael’s an archangel. He could literally keep you buried in a coffin, alive, forever.”

Scratches on the wall. Pounding and screaming in his brain. Darkness and emptiness and claustrophobia constricting his throat, imploding his chest and keeping him alone for the rest of time. The memory of angelic water in his lungs, suffocating him as he fell deeper in a tumultuous, directionless ocean.

“Okay, I get it.” He tried for levity in his voice. He failed. “But what’s the other option, huh? Michael gets outta my head and ends the world? Cuz it’s right there in Billie’s book.”

Hoping to escape the conversation, to escape the threat of vulnerability closing in on him like the walls of a metal coffin, he made way for the bathroom. 

“Yeah,” said Sam. And dammit all, why couldn’t Dean figure out how to decipher that odd sound in his brother’s voice? It wasn’t grief, it wasn’t fear over losing his brother again, and it miraculously wasn’t pity either. So what was it? “But that’s only if we don’t find another way to take Michael off the board, and there _has_ to be another way.”

“And what is the other way?”

Sam said nothing, and Dean’s chest swelled with bitter victory.

“Exactly,” he said tersely, and continued walking away, because that was normally how these conversations ended.

But, apparently, not this time. Apparently, despite Dean being done with this conversation, Sam wasn’t. (Of course he wasn’t. Sam was never done trying to pry people’s deep dark feelings out. He was just as insistent as a dentist trying to get people to floss.)

“Whatever you’re expecting,” Sam murmured. “It’ll be worse.”

God, why couldn’t he identify that sound in Sam’s voice? His words, quivering and quiet and small, were absolutely brimming with it by now. Like it was the only tone his vocal cords could produce anymore.

Dean didn’t need to turn around and face his brother to know that he’d see a wobbly sheen of unshed tears in Sam’s hazel eyes. Sam had always worn his heart on his sleeve, after all, and Dean always pitied and envied him for it in equal measure.

“You think it’ll be like Hell,” Sam rasped. “Like - like that prison cell. Cold and dark and painful. _Lonely._ But it’s not. It’s…” For a moment, Sam floundered there on the motel bed, struggling to grasp at words that wouldn’t dare reach him. “Archangels have ways of torturing you, y’know. Ways that demons could never even dream of. And they don’t even need to lay a finger on you to make you break.”

Realization shoved its way into Dean’s throat. Like he had vomited all over the carpet but someone pressed rewind and now it was flying back into his mouth. Oh _god_ -

“And they certainly don’t like it when you shove them in a box,” Sam said, voice steadily regaining its volume - but not by much. “Michael will have nothing better to do besides take his anger out on you.”

Years ago, Sam had accidentally released an archangel that then went on to try and end the world, got possessed by said archangel, and regained control long enough to kamikaze the both of them into an impenetrable prison, planning to remain locked away together for the rest of time.

Everything Dean was going through, everything he’d done in the last year, was nothing new for Sam. 

History was repeating itself again. Only this time, Dean was the one whose mistakes needed atoning. 

“Michael won’t even touch you,” said Sam. He was standing now, but his legs wavered in place like he’d fall over at any moment. “It’ll just be the two of you for... _years_ . He won’t cut you open or beat you bloody. He won’t so much as slap you. But he _will_ torture you. He’ll do things to your mind, screw around with your soul, in ways that…” A shudder. “...in ways the human language can’t even describe.”

_“Do you know what Sam’s soul felt like when I touched it? Like it had been skinned alive, Dean.”_

So that’s what the tone in Sam’s voice was. It was wisdom. Experience. An unheeded plea for blissful ignorance. In retrospect, Dean wasn’t sure why hadn't recognized it sooner.

It explained all the pitying looks, at least. It wasn’t just a matter of Sam feeling bad for Dean’s crap situation. It was Sam feeling bad for Dean’s crap situation while being reminded of his own. 

He shook his head, but kept his gaze as resolutely trained on Dean as he possibly could without breaking into a sobbing fit. “What you’re doing, Dean...it’s not a suicide mission. It’s worse.”

Swallowing hard, Dean dared to turn back around and face his brother. Face the hunched shoulders, the withdrawn features, the eyes that looked so distant and tormented, face the way he subconsciously pressed into the scar on his hand.

He should say something comforting. Something soft and consolatory, something as profound as Sam’s final words to him had been back at Stull Cemetery.

But Dean’s emotions had always been a bit of a bull in a china shop, with or without the Mark of Cain’s influence, and his words came out a little more bitter than he had intended.

“You tell me not to give up,” Dean said, unable to keep from choking on his own words. “To look for another way. But _you_ didn’t, did you?”

A flicker of anger flashed in Sam’s eyes but, ever the self-controlling, self-deprecating nun, he immediately tamped it down. “This isn’t about me.”

“Isn’t it?”

He sighed, averted his gaze. “That was different. It was the last resort, Dean. We’d already tried every possible alternative, and they all failed. It was our only option left.”

“And this _isn’t_ our last option? Billie’s books -”

“Screw Billie’s books!” Sam cried. “When have we _ever_ cared about destiny? We test out all the possibilities, and when _every last one_ fails, _then_ we resort to the drastic measures. Never a moment sooner.” 

As if finally surprised by his own outburst, Sam staggered a bit. His eyes roamed around the room, unable to land on anything in particular, least of all Dean. “You’ll live to regret it if you rush into this,” he said quietly. And then, even quieter, “We all will.”

This was why Dean couldn’t share his feelings with Sam. Because Sam's emotions were already precarious enough as is, and throwing Dean's drama into the mess would only make things worse.

“And...if we find there are absolutely _no_ other cards in the deck…” Sam bit his lip, almost hard enough to bleed, almost hard enough to punish him for the traitorous words forcing their way out from his lips. “... _then_ we’ll talk about the Ma’lak Box.”

Good grief, history really was repeating itself. Only instead of them sitting on the hood of the Impala and Sam saying how he was the least of any of them, how he had to fix his mistakes and Dean still holding too tightly onto his grudge to talk Sam out of it, they were standing in the doorway to a motel bathroom at two in the morning with both of them scared out of their minds and not a single beer in sight to lower the tension.

Not that Sam did much drinking anymore. Neither did Dean, not since Michael. Alcohol had a way of _drown-drown-drown_ ing people with mindless intoxication.

With all the emotional weight he could muster without descending into a full-blown meltdown himself, Dean placed a meaningful hand on Sam’s shoulder and stared into his eyes, trying not to imagine the flames of Hell reflected in his brother’s irises - or, for that matter, his own.

“Okay,” said Dean. Slowly, deliberately. “We’ll try our options. But if we don’t find -”

“We _will_ ,” Sam insisted, finally speaking in a tone Dean could recognize without any thought: desperation. “We _will_ find another way.” He nodded, murmuring something to himself. And Dean couldn’t be entirely certain, but it sounded an awful lot like the words, “We have to.”

They didn’t talk about the Cage. Sometimes they talked about Hell, in those first few uncertain months after his initial release, when Dean’s traumatic night terrors were unlike anything they had ever faced before. Sometimes they even talked about possession, when Sam was feeling especially drunk and charitable. 

But they never, _never_ , talked about the Cage. And they were both to blame for that; Sam for refusing to open up, and Dean for not asking, because asking would mean getting an answer, and an answer would remind him of just how horribly he’d failed his brother. Getting an answer would catapult Dean into his worst Hell memories, and he couldn’t afford to be having flashbacks when he was supposed to be helping Sam through his own.

And there was a small, selfish part of him that didn’t want to hear about Sam’s suffering. Didn’t want to listen to all the hits Sam had been knocked down with and then tally up their lists and see that Dean’s was shorter - that his list, however short it was, had negatively affected him more so than Sam’s. That while Sam was learning to deal with literal eons of unspeakable trauma, Dean couldn’t even handle a comparative _papercut_ without falling apart.

“Are you okay?” Sam asked. He blinked, but the wetness in his eyes neither ebbed nor fell away into tears. 

Dean’s responding sigh was long and ancient. But as his soul was technically around 80 years old by now, he had more than earned his right to a few weary old-man sighs at this point.

The words “Yeah, I’m okay” were poised to jump off his tongue and into the air - but they died there just as quickly.

Sam’s eyes were weepy and his face was downtrodden, and his entire posture screamed ‘desperate’. Desperate to talk, desperate to _listen_.

Right. Listening. Like every time Dean asked Cas to talk about his time being possessed by Lucifer, because hearing someone else air out the feelings Dean couldn’t yet voice, made him feel better. Made him feel...validated, almost. Like he wasn’t totally alone in his experiences, like it wasn’t a horrible thing for him to be hurting.

Sam didn’t just want Dean to talk about his pain. He _needed_ to listen, just as much as Dean needed to be heard.

So instead of denying and deflecting, as per the patented Winchester Way, Dean elected for honesty. 

“No,” he confessed. His eyes weren’t wet like his brother’s, but they were well on their way there. “No, Sam, I’m not okay. I’m…” His voice broke, his hands shook, and he unsteadily pushed himself towards the bed just in case the weight of his confession caused him to collapse. Sam dogged in his footsteps, seeming to have the same idea. “...I’m scared.”

Instead of going for his own bed, Sam sat down next to Dean, close enough for their knees to brush against each other. His voice was low and wispy. “I’m scared too.” 

“Well, aren’t we just a pair,” Dean scoffed, and dammit now his voice was all watery. Wasn’t he supposed to be the strong and brave one of the two?

“It’s alright,” Sam said. “Sometimes...sometimes you _are_ scared, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It just means what you’re facing is important. And - and no one else is gonna deal with it, because no one else has got the balls.”

A sigh. The sound of rain pattering just outside, blending in with Sam’s ever so silent tears right beside him. All that was left was the two of them and their thoughts. And their _pain_.

“Did Lucifer really never…” Dean trailed off, not even sure how to ask that question - and not sure if he wanted the answer, either.

“Touch me? Hurt me?” His chest inflated noiselessly, and his eyes got that faraway look Dean recognized from Sam's hallucination days. “No. But he didn’t have to.”

Under any other circumstance, Dean would have breathed a sigh of relief knowing Sammy hadn’t been tortured like he had. But not this time. Not knowing from Sam’s own confession that there were worse fates than vivisection.

The pounding in Dean’s head grew more intense - Michael banging relentlessly at the walls in Dean’s mind, banging so hard the whole thing threatened to collapse - and he clutched at his forehead in a meager attempt to cope.

Sam’s hand was on his arm in an instant. “Dean? Dean, what’s -”

“Just a headache,” Then, pursing his lips, added an impulsive, “I'm Sorry.”

A frown. “For what, having a headache? Dude. I’m the _last_ person you should be apologizing to for that. I mean, how many of mine have you had to put up with over the years?”

Right. Visions. 

Nevertheless, Dean refused to take the easy way out of this apology. This needed to be said. “Not for that. For…” The words didn’t want to come out, too scared, too afraid to see themselves in the light for just how ugly they were. But Dean forced them out anyway. “For Gadreel.”

It took several moments for Sam to recover from his surprise. “Dean, that was - that was _years_ ago. I’ve forgiven you. It’s -” A frown creased his mouth. “Well, it’s not _okay_. Nothing about that will ever be okay. What you did was…”

Dean solemnly nodded in agreement. To think of the drown-drown-drowning that Michael had forced him to endure, to think that Dean had put Sam through that same Hell, all while knowing how Sam felt about possession...not even the best of intentions could make that okay.

Once more Sam shook his head. “But I appreciate you apologizing. I just wish you hadn’t needed to be possessed for that to happen. I would never wish that kind of pain on you.” A long, weary pause, followed by a yawn. “Whatever. It’s behind us, Dean. I’d like to think we’ve grown past that by now. All that matters is we’re here, in this moment, together. And all of this is real. And with any luck, it’ll stay that way for many years to come." He nudged Dean’s shoulder with his own. “Butch and Sundance?”

Dean allowed himself a single, teary-eyed smile as he nudged Sam in return. “Yeah. Butch and Sundance.”

**Author's Note:**

> Wow, that felt good. I haven't written anything more than a thousand words since this pandemic started, and the lack of creative expression has been soul-crushing. It's nice to finally stretch out my legs a bit and get back into the swing of things. But as you can probably tell, I'm still super rusty. Thanks for the read though! <3


End file.
